....Or, what if the AI is programmed to value and protect human life, perhaps even "love" humanity? The counter-argument of course is that the AI would just edit that part of itself away. Well, here's an analogy. We (who are parents) are programmed to love our children. If I offered you an injection that would re-program you to no longer care about them, and some legal papers which freed you to live any lifestyle of your choosing, would you take it?
<div class="quoteheader">Quote</div><div class="quote">Scientists unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer Monday, a $100 million machine that for the first time has performed 1,000 trillion calculations per second in a sustained exercise.</div>Don't worry - the next version of MS Windows and Office will slow it down to a crawl
Fortunately there's quantum encryption too. Which is unbreakable unless you've got the fundamental ability to alter the physical laws of the universe. And it has the added benifit that quantum encryption can even tell the reciever if someone tried to read the message because the quantum signature is altered by the very act of (unsuccessfully) reading the message.
Imagine having any passage from any of those books dumped straight into your nice, clear short-term memory within a few microseconds on demand. The most gifted eidetic memory would have trouble keeping up just because of the time it would take to read that many books. No more racking your brain for a couple of minutes then resorting to Wolfram Alpha to get that formula you need once every two or three years, just pull up the page. No hoping you remember the side effects and interactions of a drug correctly, just see the right page of the PDR faster than you can blink.
It strikes me that we are already doing a meat-space equivalent. Get asked a question you can't quite remember the answer? Google/Wiki, and have the information available to you in under 30 seconds*.
. . . the current record as of now, some 18 years later, is in the neighborhood of 1700 petaflops.
